Although much smaller in form factor than a desktop computer, laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) can have drawbacks. For example, individuals sometimes find themselves in a quandary when they forget to look up a specific piece of information but have already shut down the laptop computer or PDA. The only way to retrieve the information is to boot up the entire system, which takes time. Moreover, many individuals end up carrying a variety of devices, each of them incompatible with each other and each providing different sets of information, which is cumbersome.